Friday, February 13, 2009

Ni-freakin'-hao!

We made it. We didn't sleep much on the night of the 11th-12th, as the wind was howling, and we were both afraid there might be delays at the Cleveland airport. But there weren't any problems, and all of our flights miraculously left on time. An hour to Detroit, a 90-minute layover there, then thirteen hours to Tokyo, followed by a mini-layover there (mostly spent in line going back through security for some reason), and then four hours to Beijing. We got into the Holiday Inn at around 11:30 pm Beijing time. Believe me, a bed never felt so good.

As I write this, it's nearly 7:30 in the morning. Jetlag wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, as I woke up at around 5:30 and lay in bed for a half-hour. Today we visit the Great Wall and the Olympic Stadium. Zhou says that, depending on how tired we all are, we might go see an acrobatic show tonight. We'll see.

I tried to upload a two-minute video, but it was taking forever and I finally gave up. I also brought the wrong cable, so I can't upload photos from my digital camera. So aside from very short videos (maybe 30 seconds) it looks as though I'm not going to be able to provide a visual record of the trip on the blog, at least until we get home.